Continuing with The Looting Machine Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth By Tom Burgis...

...It was a humid, overcast Sunday afternoon in April 2013, and Frederic Cilins was hungry. “Let’s sit down, grab a bite,” he said to the woman who emerged from a taxi to meet him at Jacksonville International Airport in Florida.1 According to a transcript of their conversation subsequently published by a government inquiry in Guinea, the pair found a place to eat inside the airport’s swish terminal and took their seats—Cilins, a balding Frenchman in his early fifties, and Mamadie Touré, a curvaceous west African twenty years his junior. They made small talk for a few moments, speaking in French. Cilins’s daughter had given birth the previous day, he said, making him a grandfather for the first time.

Almost immediately the conversation turned to money. “I need cash, now,” Touré said. Cilins explained that she could have $20,000 right away and would receive $200,000 more once she arrived in Sierra Leone. He would take care of the plane ticket too. She started to haggle. A waitress came over. Cilins switched to English to order a chicken sandwich for Touré and a Caesar salad for himself. He changed tack. In Sierra Leone, the neighbor to Touré’s native Guinea, she could be tranquil, far from the troubles that were closing in on them. But Touré wanted to settle the financial terms of their arrangement. Hadn’t Cilins said he would give her $50,000 up front, not $20,000?

“No, no, no,” Cilins said. “Listen carefully, listen carefully. I told you the deal.” He went over it again. A few thousand dollars was neither here nor there. “The deal for the documents and for the declaration was what I told you: we destroy all the documents, you get two hundred and then eight hundred, which is yours, whatever happens. Whatever happens, you have one million, which is yours.”

The Frenchman was losing his cool. He had done business in Africa’s wild west for years, but this was a particularly delicate conversation. Touré had in her possession half a dozen signed contracts dating from 2006 to 2010, apparently detailing how she would be rewarded in cash and shares if she helped to arrange for a company called BSG Resources (BSGR) to be awarded mining concessions, including rights to Simandou, one of the world’s richest virgin deposits of iron ore, located in a remote corner of Guinea.2 (When the contracts later became public, BSGR said they were forgeries.)
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